Redeeming Time;
Shakespeare’s Golden Mean
A few years ago I led a seminar
at the Newberry Library on the concept of time in works of Dante, Michelangelo
and Shakespeare. In my paper tonight I had intended to summarize my ten-week
seminar in forty minutes. But the paper turned out to take longer than forty
minutes, so I have cut it by two thirds. I will focus instead on a few works of
Shakespeare.
The concept of time pervades his
works. Of his 156 sonnets at least 36 are specifically about the effects of
time on love, beauty, friendship and almost every aspect of being human. My
late wife, Carolyn, and I came to enjoy the sonnets a few years ago when we
took an evening seminar at the University of Chicago. We read the poems
together and decided that our favorite is sonnet 73. In it the poet laments
ruefully on the daily and seasonal passage of time, which reminds him that his
love becomes most keen when he becomes aware that he is about to lose it. I
presume that the poem is familiar to many of you, but I beg your indulgence to
hear it once more:
Sonnet LXXIII
That time of year
thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves,
or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs
which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs,
where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the
twilight of such day
As after sunset
fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black
night doth take away,
Death's second self,
that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the
glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of
his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed
whereon it must expire
Consumed with that
which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest,
which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well
which thou must leave ere long.
In addition to the theme of time
in the sonnets, allusions to time recur throughout Shakespeare’s works.
Numerous characters in his universe make trenchant, profound or even stupid
comments about time. Macbeth’s anguished cry of despair, I presume is familiar
to most here this evening.
To-morrow, and to-morrow,
and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace
from day to day,
To the last syllable of
recorded time;
And all our yesterdays
have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief
candle!
Life's but a walking
shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his
hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no
more.
It is a tale
told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Hamlet echoes Macbeth’s
despairing feelings about time when he cries:
“The time is out of joint, Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set
it right,” or his famous, “To be, or not to be” soliloquy:
there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long
life.
For who would bear the
whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong,
the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized
love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office,
and the spurns
That patient merit of the
unworthy takes,
When he himself might his
quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
I could quote numerous
passages about time from Shakespeare’s plays, but I cite only one more, which
may be the wisest or the most foolish in all his works. That is Polonius’s
diagnosis of Hamlet’s madness:
to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night is
night, and time is time. Were nothing but to waste night, day,
and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And
tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your
noble son is mad.
Mad I call it; for, to define true madness, What is it
but to be nothing else but mad?
In following Polonius’s
council, I have cut my paper from the 40 hours spent on time in my Newberry
seminar to forty minutes this evening.
I will focus on how time
informs not only the content but also the form of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One. Shakespeare broke the rules, derived from a passage
in Aristotle's Poetics that had guided
playwrights from the Greeks through the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. These rules became known as the three classical unities. The unity of action: a play should have
one main action with no or few sub-plots. Unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and
should not attempt to compress geography. Unity of time: the action should take
place over no more than 24 hours.
Shakespeare
apparently was aware of the constriction of the three unities, but he chose to
follow his own rules. In the First Folio Edition, published in 1623, his plays
are divided into tragedies, comedies and histories. But the comedies and
tragedies are set in an historical context in Greece, Rome, Italy and Britain
and extend over 28-centuries of history, from the time of legendary Greece
before the Trojan War to Shakespeare’s own time. The plays categorized as
History plays in the First Folio are those covering the period of English
History from the Life and Death of King John in 1216, to the death of
King Henry VIII in 1547.
Generations of English school
children learned their history from Shakespeare. What little I know of English
history I have learned from his plays, even though the facts and events in the
plays are inaccurate by modern scholarly standards. The plays I am concerned
with in this paper are about English history, specifically what is known as the
Henriad, comprising Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two and Henry V. Both the plots and the characters in these plays are shaped by the
concept of time. But my focus will be on Henry
IV, Part One, which, in my opinion, is the greatest of Shakespeare’s
history plays and the most revelatory about his ideas on time. It is also one
of the funniest.
The first play
in the tetralogy covers a brief segment of time at the end of the reign of King
Richard II from 1398 to 1400. Richard ruled
from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. He ascended the throne at age ten, and
during his first years as king, government was in the hands of a series of
councils. Richard’s dependence on a small number of courtiers caused discontent
among the powerful nobles. In 1387 a group of noblemen known as the Lords Appellant took control of government. By 1389 Richard had regained control. Then,
in 1397, he took his revenge on the appellants, many of whom were executed or
exiled. In 1399, one of the most powerful noblemen, Richard’s uncle, John of
Gaunt, died. John of Gaunt was the father of Henry Bolingbroke, Richard’s cousin, whom Richard had exiled. Bolingbroke deposed Richard
and succeeded him as Henry IV.
At the time when
the action begins Richard is only 31 years old, and many of the peremptory
decisions that finally caused his downfall can be attributed to his youth and
inexperience. In the first two acts of the play Richard is portrayed as a
vacillating, weak monarch corrupted by his councilors and given to making
impetuous decisions. One of those
decisions is dramatized in the opening scene of the play. Richard reveals his flaw when he attempts to
settle a dispute between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray by decreeing that
they engage in a chivalric trial by combat. When the day of the tournament
arrives, Richard abruptly calls off the contest and pronounces his sentence of
banishment from England on both the combatants. He banishes Henry Bolingbroke
to ten years and then shortly afterwards reduces it to six. With no apparent
explanation he sentences Thomas Mowbray, a lesser nobleman, to banishment for
life. This decision plants the seeds
that will infect his realm. While Henry
is exiled in France, Richard compounds his initial mistake by confiscating
Bolingbroke’s property and wealth and squanders in on his sycophantic
councilors.
This decision is
a fatal mistake, for Henry invaded England in June 1399 with a small force that
quickly grew in numbers. He claimed initially that his goal was only to reclaim
his patrimony, but it soon became clear that he intended to claim the throne
for himself. Meeting little resistance, Bolingbroke deposed Richard and had
himself crowned as King Henry IV. He imprisoned Richard and ordered his the execution early the next
year.
Richard’s flawed
decisions result from his ineffectual leadership compounded by a naïve medieval
belief in the divine right of kings. When Richard receives the news that
Bolingbroke has returned to England with a force to take back his confiscated
property, he shrugs off the news as the ineffectual usurpation of a traitor:
So when this thief,
this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while
hath reveled in the night
Whilst we were
wandering with the antipodes,
Shall see us rising
in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit
blushing in his face,
Not able to endure
the sight of day,
But self-affrighted
tremble at his sin.
Not all the water in
the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off
from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly
men cannot depose
The deputy elected by
the Lord:
For every man that
Bolingbroke hath pressed
To lift steel against
our golden crown,
God for his Richard
hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel:
then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall,
for heaven still guards the right.
When Richard says “if angels fight/ Weak
men must fall, for heaven still guards the right,” he is ironically speaking about himself. His weakness and
indecision is immediately made manifest when the Earl of Salisbury enters with
the news that Richard has been wasting his time in Ireland on a fruitless
military expedition, while Bolingbroke’s army grows in England.
One day too late, I
fear me, noble lord,
Hath clouded all thy
happy days on earth:
O, call back
yesterday, bid time return,
And thou shalt have
twelve thousand fighting men!
To-day, to-day,
unhappy day, too late,
O'erthrows thy joys,
friends, fortune and thy state:
For all the Welshmen,
hearing thou wert dead.
Are gone to
Bolingbroke, dispersed and fled.
Of all Shakespeare’s
kings, Richard is the most poetic, which is one of the causes for his downfall.
He would rather describe action in glowing metaphors than act decisively as any
king must do. This tendency, and the contrast between Richard and Henry
Bolingbroke, becomes unmistakable in the deposition scene in Act III and in
what follows in Acts Four and Five.
When Richard receives
the news of the execution of his three closest councilors, he wails a beautiful
but pitiable lament on the fate or kings.
Of comfort no man
speak:
Let's talk of graves,
of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper
and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the
bosom of the earth,
…………………………………………
Our lands, our lives
and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we
call our own but death
And that small model
of the barren earth
Which serves as paste
and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let
us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories
of the death of kings;
How some have been
deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the
ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their
wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for
within the hollow crown
That rounds the
mortal temples of a king.
The last act of the
play is filled with Richard’s poignant reflections on his reign and the role
time has played in his life. In the prison cell where he languishes, waiting
for Bolingbroke’s hired henchman, music filters into his consciousness from the outside:
Music
Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.
This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it helps madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange broach in this all-hating world.
Henry
Bolingbroke, the newly crowned King Henry IV, takes over the realm with a
radically different style. Henry is a take-charge workaholic who manages time
like a Wall Street CEO. Yet Henry has a
guilty conscience for usurping the throne. In the final scene of the play,
Exton, who has murdered Richard in his cell on Henry’s order, enters with
Richard’s body in a coffin
EXTON
Great king, within this coffin I present
Thy buried fear: herein all breathless lies
The mightiest of thy greatest enemies,
Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought.
Henry is not pleased.
Exton, I thank thee not; for thou hast wrought
A deed of slander with thy fatal hand
Upon my head and all this famous land.
But Exton feebly protests:
From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed.
Henry, however, with consummate chutzpah absolves himself and blames
Exton.
They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee: though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labour,
But neither my good word nor princely favour:
In the next
play in the Henriad, Henry IV Part One,
the newly enthroned King Henry comes on stage fretting about lost time and
resolved to carry out his vow to do penance for his murder of Richard by making
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The time is twelve months after the murder and
the conclusion of Richard II.
So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant,
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in strands afar remote.
………………………………………….
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,
No more shall cut his master. Therefore, friends,
As far as to the sepulchre of Christ,
Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engaged to fight,
Forthwith a power of English shall we
levy;
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers'
womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd
For our advantage on the bitter cross.
But this our purpose now is twelve month old,
And bootless 'tis to tell you we will go:
This is bitterly ironic, for, contrary to Henry’s prophesy that the
recent civil war will bring peace to kingdom, it gives way to the new and
bloody prolonged War of the Roses. Before the first scene closes, Westmoreland,
the King’s closest councilor, arrives with more news that insurrection has
broken out in the north with the rebellion of Northumberland and his son,
Hotspur. This is a double blow. In addition to the news that Northumberland and
his clan are in revolt, he learns that Hotspur has distinguishes himself in the
battle and has taken several prisoners. Westmoreland inflames the King with his
praise of Hotspur: “it is a conquest for
a prince to boast of,” This reminds the King of the wayward behavior of his own son, Prince Hal.
KING HENRY IV
Yea, there thou makest me sad and makest me sin
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of honour's tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride:
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonour stain the brow
Of my young Harry. O that it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.
This first scene not only sounds the keynote of time, which will play
out in the following five acts, it adumbrates the conflict between Prince Hal
and Hotspur and its final solution in Act V at the battle of Shewsberry.
Both Henry IV, Part One and Part
Two have dual plots; the main plot centers on the civil war between Henry
IV and the Percies. The secondary plot
centers on Prince Hal and Falstaff. The unifying element in both plots is the
concept time. Whereas time in the main plot in Scene I is fast paced and
frantic, time in the subplot is slow and desultory. The lackadaisical attitude
toward time is immediately evident at the opening of Scene II. Prince Hal is entertaining Falstaff in his
London apartment about noon where they are nursing hangovers.
Falstaff begins the first of their several hilarious exchanges of wit
when he asks Hal: “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” Hal regards it as a
meaningless question and replies:
Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon
benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to
demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know.
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the
day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes
capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the
signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself
a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no
reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand
the time of the day.
Falstaff is undeterred, but he does not deny that he has other more
important concerns than to keep track of time. He is a highwayman, and a
creature of the night. He says:
Indeed, you come near
me now, Hal; for we that take
purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not
by Phoebus, he,' that wandering knight so fair.'
…………………………………………………..
Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not
us that are squires of the night's body be called
thieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's
foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the
moon; and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and
chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.
PRINCE HENRY
Thou sayest well, and it holds well too;
for the
fortune of us that are the moon's men doth
ebb and
flow like the sea, being governed, as the
sea is,
by the moon.
This witty exchange is more significant than it might seem at first. The
structure of play is a study in contrasts; a close reading will reveal that
most of the action in the subplot takes place at night under the influence of
the moon, and the action in the main plot takes place in the daylight under the
influence of Phoebus, the sun. During
this exchange between Hal and Falstaff, Poins, the lookout man for the
highwaymen enters with the good news that rich travelers are staying in Gadhill
on a pilgrimage to Canterbury:
But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning, by four
o'clock, early at Gadshill! there are pilgrims going
to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders
riding to London with fat purses: I have vizards
for you all; you have horses for yourselves:
Gadshill lies to-night in Rochester: I have bespoke
supper to-morrow night in Eastcheap: we may do it
as secure as sleep. If you will go, I will stuff
your purses full of crowns; if you will not, tarry
at home and be hanged.
It is noteworthy here that Poins is very specific about the hour when
the rich travelers will be getting underway “to-morrow morning, by four
o'clock, early at Gadshill!” And it is also significant that Poins has made
reservation for dinner the following night at the Boar’s Head Tavern in
Eastcheap. He then convinces the Prince
to be a part of his scheme to waylay Falstaff and the other thieves after they
have robbed the travelers with the promise for more fun the next night at the
Boar’s Head Tavern. Poins explains to Hal,
The virtue of this jest will be, the
incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will
tell us when we meet at supper
At this point Hal delivers a soliloquy that reveals his motives for
playing the role of the prodigal son and a significant revelation of the
character that is destined to be the future King Henry V.
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
“Redeeming time” is the key
phrase in this play and in my opinion in all the plays of the Henriad. It is up
to Hal to redeem time wasted by King Richard and abused by his father, as well
as the time he has wasted playing with his drinking buddies in the tavern. But
that transformation can wait. He will in the meantime follow through with Poins’
plot to waylay the travelers.
Most interpretations of the motivations of Prince Hal prior to the 20th century consider him the ideal Renaissance
prince and later as Henry V the most
heroic and revered English monarch until Queen Elizabeth. Much 20th century interpretation,
however, cite this soliloquy as evidence of a duplicitous Machiavellian
politician.
Hal’s attitude toward time
is in marked contrast to the other characters in the play. Falstaff
has a child-like attitude. He does not much concern himself with the past or
future, but only time present. King Henry and Hotspur are his polar opposites.
This contrast becomes obvious in the next scene, as the action returns to the
palace in London, where Henry has summoned the rebellious Percy clan. As he did
in the opening lines of the play the King reveals how little he knows
himself.
My blood hath been too cold and temperate,
Unapt to stir at these indignities,
And you have found me; for accordingly
You tread upon my patience: but be sure
I will from henceforth rather be myself,
Mighty and to be feared, than my condition;
Which hath been smooth as oil, soft as young down,
And therefore lost that title of respect
Which the proud soul ne'er pays but
to the proud.
It
is another of the several ironies in the play that the King thinks that his
problems have been caused because he is too patient. But his unruly temper
incites the temper of Hotspur and to a lesser degree his father,
Northumberland, and his uncle, the Earl of Worcester. Hotspur is angry with his
father for assisting Bolingbroke in usurping the crown from King Richard.
Shall it for shame be spoken in these days,
Or fill up chronicles in time to come,
That men of your nobility and power
Did gage them both in an unjust behalf,
As both of you--God pardon it!--have done,
To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,
An plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke?
And shall it in more shame be further spoken,
That you are fooled, discarded and shook off
By him for whom these shames ye underwent?
No; yet time serves wherein you may redeem
Your banished honours and restore yourselves
Into the good thoughts of the world again,
Revenge the jeering and disdained contempt
Of this proud king, who studies day and night
To answer all the debt he owes to you
Even with the bloody payment of your deaths:
It is noteworthy that Hotspur chooses
the same word, “redeem” that Prince Hal uses in the forgoing scene. But whereas
Hal vows to redeem time, Hotspur vows to redeem his father’s “banished honors.”
Northumberland cannot
control Hotspur’s impetuous actions, whereas the King laments that Prince Hal
cannot be prodded to act. While his uncle, Worcester goads Hotspur, his father
tries to control his excessive concern for honor. His father explains “imagination of some great exploit drives him beyond the
bounds of patience.” This remark only sparks Hotspur’s impatience:
Hot. By
heaven methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck
bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon,
Or dive
into the bottom of the deep,
Where
fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck
up drowned honour by the locks;
So he
that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities:
As
the first act closes, Hotspur calls for action::
Uncle,
adieu: O! let the hours be short,
Till fields and blows and groans
applaud our sport!
A
discussion of Hotspur’s honor invites comparison with Falstaff’s famous
soliloquy on honor at the battle of Shewsbury.
Fal. I
would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.
Prince. Why,
thou owest God a death. [Exit.
Fal. ’Tis
not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so
forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me
on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour
set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour
hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? a word. A trim reckoning!
Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.
It is insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it: honour is a
mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism. [Exit.
The difference
between Hotspur and Hal with regard to their attitudes toward time and honor is
only one of several attributes that sharply delineate their characters. Aristotle’s definition of virtue
is the choice of the golden mean between excess and defect. Prince Hal conforms
in almost every respect to what Aristotle describes as the man of practical
wisdom. In this play Hotspur and King Henry represent excess, whereas Falstaff
represents defect. They represent excess and defect not only with regard to
time and honor, but also to at least four others attributes: courage; honesty;
sloth; temperance and justice. Courage,
for example, if taken to excess, would manifest as recklessness,
and if deficient, as cowardice.
Falstaff accuses Hal of being a
coward, and Hal accuses Falstaff of being a coward. Most critics of the play
consider Falstaff both a liar and a coward. And if Falstaff is a coward, what
is Hotspur? According to Aristotle courage is a mean between cowardice and
recklessness. Falstaff is defective with regard to the mean. He is a coward and
avoids death-threatening events whenever confronted. Hotspur is excessive with
regard to the mean. He courts danger for the sake of honor. Falstaff differs
from Hotspur, however, in that Falstaff is aware of his defect with regard to
the mean. When he saved his life at the battle of Shrewsbury by feigning death,
he explains. “The better part of valor is discretion, in the which part I have
saved my life.”
Hotspur’s excess and Falstaff’s defect with deviate from Hal’s golden mean. And this is symbolically revealed in the last act of the play. While Hotspur fights fearlessly for his honor, Northumberland, his father, fails to come to stand against the advancing Bolingbroke forces. Meanwhile Hal is redeeming the time by assembling the King’s citizen army with the help, however pitiable, of his old drinking buddy, Falstaff.
The theme of time comes to an ironical conclusion in Act Viv in the final battle scene. When Hal and Hotspur meet on the battlefield. Hotspur boastfully taunts the Prince:
“Harry; for the hour is come
To end the one of us; and would to God
Thy
name in arms were now as great as mine!
Hal responds:
I’ll
make it greater ere I part from thee;
And
all the budding honours on thy crest
I’ll
crop, to make a garland for my head.
This response is too much for
Hotspur, and he makes one last boast before they fight: “I can no longer
brook thy vanities.” They fight. Douglas reenters to fight with Falstaff,
who falls down as if he were dead. Douglas exits and Hotspur is wounded, and
falls with his last words recognizing that he has been time’s fool:
O, Harry!
thou hast robbed me of my youth. 84
I better
brook the loss of brittle life
Than
those proud titles thou hast won of me;
They
wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:
But
thought’s the slave of life, and life
time’s fool; 88
And time,
that takes survey of all the world,
Must have
a stop. O! I could prophesy,
But that
the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on
my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust, 92
And food for— [Dies.
Thus Hotspur dies as time’s fool, while Falstaff falls down feinting death. Hal emerges as the temperate hero who has followed the mean in his attitude toward time, with the dead Hotspur, lying on one side, and the Falstaff, feigning death on the other.
The
characterizations in this play are so rich and various that I would go far
beyond my time limit to continue making these comparisons. But I would like to
spend my remaining time talking about how time informs the structure of the
play.
In the first scene of Act II in the
yard of an inn in Rochester where the travelers are sleeping on the road to
Canterbury, two carriers
are grooming the horses and preparing the carriage for the journey. The First
Carrier comments on the time of the morning: “Heigh-ho! an it be not four by
the day, I'll be hanged, and yet our horse not packed.” The Second Carrier then
enters complaining that the fleas in the Inn have been biting so fiercely that
he has not slept since the first cock. Their conversation continues about the
wretched flea ridden condition of the Inn. Then Gadshill enters as the advance spotter to check on the
itinerary of the rich travelers: “Good
morrow, carriers. What's o'clock?” The First Carrier replies, “I think it be two o'clock.” This response is
obviously the Carrier’s attempt to confuse Gadshill, for immediately before
Gadshill arrives and asks for the time, the Carrier had vouched that “if it be
not four by the day, I'll be hanged.” The Carriers purposefully obscure the
time to confuse Gadshill, whose objective is to lay an ambush for the
travelers. But Gadshill insistently asks, “what time do you mean to come to
London?” But again the Second Carrier gives an ambiguous answer; “Time enough
to go to bed with a candle, I warrant.”
Some
time after four in the morning while darkness still shrouds the action,
Falstaff, Gadshill, Bardolf and Peto hijack the travelers while Hal and Poins
lay in ambush to take the loot from the looters. As Falstaff
and his pals are sharing the loot, the Prince and Poins set upon them, and they
all run away. Hal and Poins then set off on a day-long ride to the Boar’s Head
tavern in Eastcheap. There they wait to meet Falstaff, and other minions of the
night. The action resumes in Act Two, Scene Four. Hal notes that it about
midnight and he whiles away the time waiting for Falstaff. As the party gets
going they relive the morning’s encounter with the travelers. The Sheriff
arrives to apprehend Falstaff. Hal lies
that the fat rouge is not there and asks the Sheriff, “I think it is good
morrow. Is it not?” The Sheriff answers, “Indeed, my lord, I think it be two
o’clock.” This means that the time elapsed since Gadshill had encountered the
Carriers on the road to Rochester is 24 hours. Thus all the action in the
sub-plot, which we see on stage, takes place at night, while Falstaff and his
minions of the moon are working..
In the third act of the play, the main plot and the
sub plot merge. The apotheosis of the theme of time occurs appropriately in Act
III ii at the center of the structure of the plot. The scene is divided into
two parts. In the first part the King rehearses a remarkable lecture explaining
his political theory, which betrays his duplicitous character. He begins by
scolding Hal for forsaking his royal heritage and associating with the
riffraff. The King then boasts of his own exemplary behavior as a young man and
how he won the crown. As a young man, he claims that, unlike Hal and his
predecessor, King Richard, he maintained a low profile, so that when he came
back to England to claim the throne, he appeared "like a comet" to be
wondered at.
After praising his own "sun-like majesty,"
he berates the showy, ineffectual, King Richard. Then the King weeps. Hal’s
laconic reply suggests that his father's words have stung:
I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord,
Be more myself.
Hal's brief response spurs his father to pull out all
the stops by impugning Hal's manhood and his courage. He compares Hal to
Richard, his foppish predecessor, and himself to Hotspur. This response
symbolically marks Hal’s emergence as "sun-like majesty," and his
redemption of his wasted time:
I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son,
The King's reaction to Hal's impassioned vow seals
their reconciliation and the defeat of the rebels. The King predicts,
A hundred thousand rebels die in this:
Thou shall have charge and sovereign trust herein.
From this point to the end of the play, Hal emerges as
the sun from behind the clouds as he had vowed in Act I ii. He now enlists all
his drinking buddies, in the King’s forces and issues orders to each of them in
the service of the King.
Go bear this letter
To my brother John; this to my Lord of Westmoreland.
Go, Poins, to horse, to horse! for thou and I
Have thirty miles to ride ere dinner-time.
Jack, meet me to-morrow in the Temple-hall
At two o'clock in the afternoon:
The Prince’s plan to meet Falstaff at two o'clock the
next afternoon in the daylight is in sharp juxtaposition with the time lapsed
in Act II, from 2 AM on one morning to 2 AM.
Because I have run out of time, and I am aware that
brevity is the soul of wit, I will try to make a concise summary of how time
informs the structure of the play. I point to the occurrences of over 100
references to time in the play and in the opening and the closing of the action
of the main plot as well as in several of the acts and scenes. The work of
Falstaff and his minions of the moon takes place in a 24 hour period at night,
and the action of the King, once Hal has emerged from behind the metaphorical
clouds, takes place in 24 hours of sunlight. But more importantly Hal begins
his formation as the future King Henry V by learning how to bide his time by
following the golden mean.
Paper read at Chicago Literary Club,
October 19, 2009
Cliff Dwellers Club,
Chicago, Illinois
Ed
Quattrocchi
1225
Hinman Avenue
Evanston,
Illinois 60202
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